I’m the kind of monster that turns into a boyfriend. I hide in the bed, not under it. I’ve been groomed at very good schools, read very good books, and had very good jobs. I’ve learned under the vilest patriarchs. I’ve cemented my rep so I fit right in.

But still, I’m a monster. Let me explain a recent encounter where someone saw my monster fur, my ugly, rough scales long after I was supposed to have outgrown them. Claws, and long, sharp teeth, it turns out, are much harder to conceal. The past is the past but mistakes and cruelties live in me, shrinking only a little with age.

In my twenties, I had a girlfriend I disrespected because I loved her. I thought love meant irrational disrespect. Shouting matches were proof of passion. Broken dishes, little exclamation points on my upside down love letter of a life. I raged when she was out with other men, even though we had an arrangement. I used and misused her gifts openly, from her apartment to her parents’ connections, to run with the Brooklyn black artists of the early 2000s. She made me into someone promising just by association. She doted on me so her friends doted on me.

I felt my impossible outsider insecurity had finally been cured. She loved me so I was finally whole.

Then her brother got ill, the kind that doesn’t cure. I turned right back into a full-fledged monster. In our tiny apartment, I stalked her shadows, pried her journal pages looking for clues to mind control. When I saw her bike parked one day, near her other lover’s house, I hung out at my friend’s place nearby, deliberately making store runs and checking to see the bike’s whereabouts. My twisted thinking said I would finally discover I was unworthy of her love. Through her cheating. Through her abandonment. I became convinced I could “catch her” even though she had chosen me and we were together.

How many hours she gon park that shit there?

When the bike was still there, after many rounds of blunts, at 11 p.m., I trudged home. I was building a case against her, the voices in my head served as character witnesses.

I’d let her know she couldn’t lie to me anymore. (She hadn’t lied. I knew where she’d be just not for how long.) I would turn my jealousy into her lie by omission in this planned argument. There would be no objections since, everyone knows, women are liars. Especially women who love men, and love sex, and live out loud in their love for those two things. Those are the ultimate liars, I reasoned. How would she form any rebuttal? I’d figured out, the girl that I loved and had sex with was the very same loving, lusting, breathing phenomenon whether I was there or not.

That destroyed my boyfriend shell. Soon, only the monster presided. I smashed the vintage globe she’d gotten as a housewarming gift from her father. During that same argument, I threw a glass of water in her face, almost like a bad sitcom. A horror show sprouted from her face as the liquid hit her and dribbled from her precious lips down to her Coogi sweater. She was a Biggie fan. I loved her so much it made my head hurt.

I had to read better books, study better philosophies to deserve her. Since I couldn’t keep up, I subconsciously wanted to pull her back down to where I was.

That’s the short version. The longer one gobbled up sleepless nights. Waking up to argue, following her location pin, standing by the window in the rain, the ink smearing a long hate letter that she later told me she couldn’t decipher — to my benefit, because I was saying crazy shit that couldn’t be reversed.

That girlfriend, from almost twenty years ago, moved in with another Black woman, a writer, who helped pay the big rent hole I’d left in her Brooklyn life.

So back to the present. In June, I ran into that ex’s roommate at a big street fair standing next to one of my newer Black woman friends. The newer friend reported that she could no longer be a friend of mine, could no longer share backyard blunts or strange hotel nights after lots of whiskey.

“I talked to my friend about you. Are you an abuser? I need to know.”

The following is not what I said but paraphrases. I recorded it in a voice note. The names have been omitted to protect survivors of abuse.

“I was a monster in a past life. I once consumed a woman who volunteered her love to me — if only I didn’t consume her. That was her only wish. Instead, I tore into her flesh with my jagged canines. We thought we loved each other. Whatever mistakes we made, I worsened them by treating her poorly and being cruel.”

The note went on:

“The first few times I gashed her and took parts of her I couldn’t return, she said, ‘All right but that has to be the last time.’ Like any monster, I laid low for a bit but resumed my heart meal once she entered my bed or I entered hers. She was irresistible. Plus, I was young.”

She answered in a voice note:

“That sounds victim-blame-y, when you say it like that. I don’t like that one bit, Andrew, and I’ve done so much to keep abusers out of my life. You know about my situation with R_ and I don’t want to invite toxicity like that if I can avoid it.”

I replied, knowing she’d heard my low growls between the lines:

“It’s your right to keep safe. I can’t blame you for choosing your best interests. I am a monster, after all. I ate that one woman and I killed the villagers. I never once denied my crimes. But you take care.”

I started to feel prickles of fur poke out from under the layer of thin skin, pushing and itching where it had once laid still. Under the wrists and knuckles the most. A patch started to protrude from my lower back. Maybe there would be a tail this time. I had always been a monster, just integrated very well by this point. We have lost touch, but if I run into my former friend she’ll see my eyes glow like the monster I’d said I evolved from.

To her, I was a “nice guy.” Everyone knows nice guys are the monsters they’d never claim to be. I’m not the type of nice guy to run a tab of niceties a woman then has to pay by sleeping with me.

I’m the other type, where a pleasant experience or two has to be weighed against co-dependent jealousy, ill-tempered vandalism, performative goodness alongside crude subjugation.

I have knelt to the patriarchy too. I’ve washed my sins in thicker sins than my bloodline. Not ones to hit women, my kinfolk do their nastiest work as adulterers, absentee fathers, pride mongers. anti-woman philosophers.

I loathe tenderness, especially when it’s from me. I’ll tell a woman I’m trying to sleep with or have slept with the opposite. Bring your softest self, by which I mean: “tenderize your flesh to make it easier to consume.”

I am a typical movie monster. In “Hansel and Gretel,” I’m the sweet old lady in a gingerbread house who is really a witch. In Scream, I’m Billy Loomis, the heartthrob. In Obsession, I’m Bear, the store clerk who makes a bad wish.

Bear, played in a doe-eyed, sniveling turn by Michael Johnston, can only love Nikki, the object of his infatuation, if there’s no risk. He needs her to empty out so he can better consume her. That’s not Nikki, though. She’s complex, funny, sweet, and sharp. Rather than risk being cut by her fine edges, Bear wishes (wrongly) for her devotion beyond all reason, beyond what her soul can summon. He doesn’t wish for a lasting love or for the chance to date. He wants prey.

“I wish Nikki loved me more than anything in the world.”

What kind of monster wants a love like this? The nice guy monster must lurk among your circle if you ask. Obsession’s brilliance is in this choice: Bear presents as a protagonist but he is the monster. His love is a deal with the devil that he can’t break because, despite its grotesque consequences, he’s too greedy to turn away. Faced with the prospect of either rejection or the homicidal obsession of his love object, he’ll choose carnage every time.

That’s a choice only a monster would make.

Built into masculinity as we know it is the admission — and submission to — the worst of greedy men. Left with the choice to breed with thousands of women or to settle with one, our culture celebrates and rewards the reckless. But the depletion of communal harmony in favor of cruel gratification makes men monsters. This is the design flaw in human evolution. Not only are the men destroying women and families in the short term, we’re becoming part of a biological donor class, shriveling up and dying alone once our seed’s been spread. Playing to our basest instincts, we hobble into isolation, the weaker of the sexes left to fend for ourselves in a truncated lifespan.

I’m often examining my inner monster, because even as he atrophies, his hunger remains. I had a friend leave me because she wanted no parts of that. When I look my monster in the eyes, I can’t blame her.